Concepts and consequences of case grammar

John Anderson 6 between

John Anderson 6 between NPs and semantic relations, the so-called ‘θ-roles’. ‘Deep structure’ thus comes to conform to concept a of ‘casegrammar’. However, in the approach advocated in Chomsky (1981), another level has been introduced, ‘logical form’, which is associated with a component of the grammar that interprets ‘surface structure’ (§§2.2, 2.6). ‘Logical form’, while intended ‘to capture what the language faculty determines about the meaning of an expression (Chomsky 1995: 21), remains part of ‘ “narrow syntax” ’ (p.34). With respect to ‘logical form’, however, ‘the fundamental notion is that of θ-role’ (p.101). ‘θ-roles’ – i.e. semantic relations – are basic to both levels. Finally, ‘deep structure’ (as well as ‘surface structure’) is abandoned as part of the ‘minimalist program’ (Chomsky 1995: ch.3, §3.3). ‘θ-roles’, or ‘thematic relations’, remain, however, a crucial property of the head-complement relation (Chomsky 1995: ch.3, §3.2). And we are left with a level, ‘logical form’, at which ‘the fundamental relation is that of θ-role’. What mainly differentiates the early ‘casegrammar’ view summarised as concepts a and b and the view put forward in the ‘minimalist program’ seems to be simply this: in early ‘casegrammar’ the structural level determined by the semantic relations and other lexical properties is rather immediately constructed; in the ‘minimalist program’ the association between these lexical properties and ‘logical form’ is a complex one, involving a range of structural operations, including crucially ‘mergers’ and ‘movements’. Developments in ‘casegrammar’ since the 80s have lessened this discrepancy; but the relationship between lexicon and erection of structure remains much less complex than in the ‘minimalist program’. But we must, at long last, turn to some of these developments in ‘casegrammar’, what I have labelled ‘consequences’ of ‘casegrammar’. One of these, however, can be seen as a consequence of another concept that, while not established in all the early ‘casegrammars’, came to be accepted in a range of later developments. Fillmore (1968) remains undecided about how semantic relations are to be represented, and he puts forward the constituency-tree structures in (4), (7) and (8) very tentatively. Nevertheless, it became standard in the many applications of his work that followed. Other researchers sharing in the general ‘casegrammar’ program adopted dependency structures in their syntactic representations. This approach to syntactic structure had developed independently of ‘casegrammar’, initially under the impetus of the work of Tesnière (1959). But a number of researchers (such as Robinson 1970, Anderson 1971 and, with qualifications, Starosta 1988) saw it as particularly suitable for representing the ‘relational’ character of ‘case relations’, which could be seen as linking lexical head and complement. We could in such terms substitute for (4a) the representation in (10): (10) a. M : : V : : : : O A : : : : : N : N : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : Past dry them (by) Bill

7 Conceptsandconsequencesofcasegrammar b. M/V : : V/O(A) : : : : O/N A/N : : : : : N : N : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : Past dry them (by) Bill All the complements are said to depend on their respective heads; this dependency relation, rather than a constituency one, is indicated by the solid lines in (10), with each head at a higher level than the dependent(s) to which it is linked. Such representations eliminate, for instance, the duplication of the case relation and K nodes, which required some mechanism for filtering the case information from the case relation node to the K node. I have adopted in (10b) the slash notation of Anderson (1997), whereby the valency of each head is indicated to the right of the slash, and its category to the left. This representation illustrates rather ‘graphically’ the extent to which the structure of the tree is determined by the lexical valencies represented by the slash notation. Dependency representation I shall regard as a concept of ‘casegrammar’, despite its far from universal adoption. So we can add it to concepts a-c: Conceptsofcasegrammar: a) the constructional relevance of semantic relations: there is a level of syntactic structure that is constructed on the basis of (among other things) the semantic relations contained in the lexical entries of predicators b) the irrelevance of ‘deep structure’ this level replaces (and displaces) ‘deep structure’ as the interface with the lexicon and as basic to syntactic structure c) the derivative status of linearity d) the dependency representation of syntax syntactic structure is represented by dependency trees with labelled nodes This concept, however, leaves much to be further specified about representation. Indeed, all four concepts together leave much of syntactic structure and the form of the syntax undetermined. But certain ‘consequences’ impose themselves. 2. Consequences ofcasegrammar I shall now list in the form of a set of questions consequencesof the ‘casegrammar’ programme whose pursuit is at least encouraged or indeed demanded by the concepts that we’ve looked at: